Hi all -- I wanted to post a quick news post to let you know that community imports are now live. There's also some other content inside... down past the cut!

Community Imports

There are a few things you should be aware of before you go ahead and start importing your communities. Most of this has been mentioned in the last news post, but just to reiterate the salient details:

* You must be a maintainer of the community on both sites.

* The imported content will be owned by an OpenID account for the original author. This means that the content is still under the control of the author -- LJ/IJ/etc users can come to DW, log in with their remote account, and manage their content.

* This is temporarily restricted to paid accounts. We will undo this restriction as soon as the import queue has died down -- probably in a week or two?

* We have also temporarily limited comment imports to 100,000 comments. If your community has more than that, the comment import will fail. We will lift this restriction as soon as we're sure that we can handle the additional load. (Better safe than overloaded and slow!)

To initiate an import, you should head on over to the Import Content tool. At the top of the page will be a dropdown showing communities you control. Pick where you would like to import to, and the rest of the process should be pretty simple.

Please let us know if you have any trouble. We'll be watching this news post and the support queue and doing our best to make sure that this is an easy, pleasant experience.

Traffic and Growth

I also want to take a moment and say thank you to all of you for being really patient with us over the past few weeks. We've been really hammered by all of the new traffic and have been rolling out new servers to serve the additional capacity.

We've already added two extra web servers and we currently have an order in for two more database servers with extra RAM and disk space. This is a lot of extra capacity and will help to make sure that we continue to be responsive and grow as our userbase grows.

Some people have expressed concern over our ability to scale with the demand. I'm pretty comfortable saying that we've weathered the increased usage in the past few weeks rather well and I don't see that changing. While there are always unexpected bumps along the way, I can promise to keep everybody informed about exactly what is going on. If you haven't yet, you might want to bookmark our dreamwidth Twitter account. We use it pretty regularly and it's the first place we will go if Dreamwidth is down and we need to let you know what's up.

Farewell 2011!

The end of the year (according to the calendar I use, anyway) is here. In a few days it will be 2012. I don't know what the future holds, but I'm really excited to see it.

Thank you for being a part of Dreamwidth. We look forward to making this place even better for you!

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You guys are absolutely incredible for pulling this off so swiftly. Thank you for all the hard work you're putting into this - both in your features and making sure that the transition is smooth for everyone!

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I believe that I speak for almost the entire LJ==>Dreamwidth migrant RP community when I say thank you guys so much! I know I for one will be importing my musebox once this goes live for unpaid accounts. You've all worked so hard, and been so kind! I am going to miss LJ (I kinda grew up there. almost literally, when I think about it, I've been there since about 2004...) but I think I'm going to be happy here. :)

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Okay, this is kind of an off topic question, but I've been lurking around the very edges/fringes of RPville for ages, and I have been curious forever: what's a musebox and how does it differ from a RP game?

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Part of it is that we inherited the benefit of 10+ years of performance tweaks, architecture improvements, and bugfixes from LiveJournal -- many of which were made by mark or done while he was working for LJ, so he's really familiar with them! -- that mean we can tune a webserver until it squeaks, performance-wise. There's also a lot of additional things we run over and above running the Dreamwidth server code that help out: it's not just a question of "download code, install code, start a website"; there's something like a dozen other things (some of which I will explain if you're really curious!) that help us to keep things running, like a load balancer (that helps to direct traffic to whichever server is least busy at any given time) and a memory caching system that pulls frequently-accessed data into memory (fast) instead of having to read it from the database each time (slow).

There's also the time-honored tactic of "stuff gets slow, throw more hardware at it". *G*

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You guys have been even more amazing than usual over the past couple weeks; thanks for always living up to your ideals for the site and going above and beyond with customer service. I hope everybody at Dreamwidth has an amazing New Year's!